The World That's on the Other Side
by ViaLethe
Summary: When River Tam is fourteen, a man steps out of an alley and tells her her future. It turns out she doesn't want it. AU, River/Mal.


Thanks to ebfiddler for the beta!

A/N: This is a time-travel AU heavily inspired by the first of the R. Tam Sessions - I love that one glimpse we get of an older, unmarred River, and the possibilities of what she might have been.

* * *

_The World That's on the Other Side_

I.

It begins, for River, in the short space between her ballet class and her evening tutoring session (Latin today, which she loves for its influence, for the way its tendrils spread through the etymology of a dozen languages, the ripple effects through history), and she's so busy running through the dance in her head while translating the moves into a language long dead that she nearly doesn't catch her name.

But there it is again, _River_, hissed out like someone wants her attention without gaining that of anyone else, and she seeks out the source in the late afternoon sidewalk traffic, finally finding him at the mouth of an alleyway. Not an encouraging sign really, she reflects, and nothing else about him exactly is either – a man older than Simon, younger than her father, light brown hair, nondescript clothes. Looking very much like the kind of person who doesn't want to be remembered, and isn't doing too badly at it.

Still, her feelings tell her to ignore all that, to ignore Simon's recent warnings ("You're growing up now, River," he'd said after her last birthday, all awkward, fumbling for words, "and, well. Just...be careful around boys. Around men. Do you understand?" And she'd rolled her eyes and said, "I understand the concept of assault, Simon," because _really_, she was fourteen now, not a child anymore) and find out why the man who wanted to be ignored by everyone didn't want to be ignored by her.

At first, she thinks she's been wrong, when she steps in front of him and his face changes, just the tiniest bit, and she feels an aching, bittersweet wave pass through her for no reason at all.

"_Lao tian ye_," he says softly, staring at her. "Really is you, ain't it?"

She starts to ask the reasonable question, _Do I know you_ close to tripping off her tongue, but he blinks and shakes his head, and all the wonder has gone out of his voice when he speaks again, replaced by urgency, and pure business.

"Look, I gotta talk to you. About the Academy."

Later, she could never say just why she'd done it – she would miss her lessons, she'd have to make up a story, it was against all common sense and everything she'd been taught – but she nods, and follows him, and listens as he tells of her future.

x-X-x

He doesn't tell her the entire story that day. There isn't enough time, for one – she might be willing to miss a lesson on this odd chance, but dinner is another matter entirely – and he's reluctant to go too far, to delve into details of just what will happen to her at this school; he leaves it instead at vague, implied horrors, and sitting on a park bench under the bright, open sky, River would be more inclined to laugh than believe him if it weren't for that feeling fluttering in her stomach, winding its way up her spine like a current, whispering at the back of her brain: _this is truth_.

When she leaves him, she leaves not quite convinced, but with a promise to meet him again the following week.

x-X-x

She half expects he won't be there when she returns, that he was just another bit of her imagination run too wild, that he was crazy, that he'd just been playing some sick game.

But he's there after all, looking tired and run down, a poor fit for the manicured gardens around them.

_A poor fit for this planet,_ she thinks; everything about him is wrong, says _outsider_ to her so clearly it might as well be printed on his forehead.

Everything, that is, except the way her looks at her, familiar and fond. It ought to make her frightened, ought to make her turn her back and never seek him out again.

Instead she sits, and begins without preamble. "How do you know these things?"

He looks at her for a long moment, long enough that she knows he's weighing each word, that whatever he says will not be the truth, not wholly.

"Knew a girl who was sent there," he says finally, looking away. "Took her years 'fore she could remember even half of what happened to her in there, and once she did she didn't care to remember the rest. And those who did it to her never stopped huntin' her, never let her have more'n a moment's peace."

It's no more than she'd expected, after the things he'd told her before, stories of mutilation and experiments, of genius twisted into something sharp and savage. No, it's the _way_ he speaks of it that's surprising, his voice like a cage, barely holding back the bitterness underneath.

"Is she still alive?" River asks softly, following the instincts that lead her through conversations, the ones that tell her _too close_, or _follow that,_ and _go deeper._

She watches the muscle along his jaw tighten and flex, watches his eyes fixed on the far horizon.

"She was, last I saw of her," he responds eventually, and when he finally turns to look at her it's with a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, and a shiver goes through her limbs like a warm breeze shaking the blossoms free from the cherry trees around them.

x-X-x

She insists on an interview with a student of the Academy, saying she wants to be sure of the program, wants to know if it's as challenging as they've made it sound, if they turn out students with the level of learning she requires.

They send a girl who's bright and pretty and polished, and has careful, studious answers to every question, a girl who seems to know everything River wants to know, who is everything River wants to be.

Her parents are impressed, and full of high praise; Simon is too, later on when they have a chance to talk together. "You just thought she was pretty," River says, and laughs at her brother's stammers and blushing.

She tells them all she was unimpressed, that she isn't certain anymore, that she's been thinking of other courses of study.

She does not tell them that she _is_ certain, down to her bones, that the girl was lying, that she had never been to the Academy, that every word she said was wrong.

x-X-x

"I won't go there," she tells him, the next time they meet, the early summer sun shining down on her head, feeling like freedom. She doesn't tell him about the girl they sent, about the lies she told; it would feel too much like validation, and she's still unsure of his motives, unsure of almost everything now in what had always been her very solid world. "They've already scheduled an interview, so I have to go for that, but I won't stay there."

She would swear he looks afraid for a second, before some instinct takes over and wipes his expression blank.

"I'll tell my brother I've decided against them before I go," she says, trying to soothe him, trying to calm the thread of anxiety his fear has woven into her. "He wouldn't let them just take me."

"Believe that's true enough, little one," he says, and gives her that lopsided smile again, the one that makes her feel safe and on the edge of cliff, all at once.

She wonders, as she leaves with a promise to meet him the day after the interview, how he knows what he does, how it seems there is nothing about her that is a surprise to him.

x-X-x

The interview is mercifully short; she tries to keep her mind carefully blank, to be honest and clear and just enough. She's afraid for a few moments that it shows, that she's paused for a second too long or smiled a bit too wide, but the man across the table doesn't seem to find anything amiss, just continuing to talk on in his gentle voice (she think there's an edge lurking in it, something cold and slimy and desperately evil, and she feels her paranoia blooming like a flower in her gut, wondering for a moment if this is what going mad feels like, if she's throwing away everything on the word of a stranger).

"Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?" the man asks, and she pulls herself free of the black hole of her spiraling thoughts, and responds with a question; if he thinks of it as an answer, that's his problem, not hers.

"Would I still be allowed to dance?"

x-X-x

She returns home, throws up her dinner, and cries in the bath, shuddering with fear, with relief, with the after effects of adrenaline flooding her bloodstream, until she's limp and exhausted, and finally feels clean.

II.

She continues to meet him all through the summer, though she could hardly say why; she's touched by his obvious relief when she appears the day after the interview, a little pale and sleepless maybe, but still there, still free.

She thinks at first that surely that will be the end of it, that he'll move on to another unsuspecting candidate, like some rough-hewn guardian angel, that he'll vanish from her life as suddenly as he appeared.

But he doesn't, and their meetings become a regular part of her world, a break between classes and lessons and the parts of her life that are still normal. They don't talk of the Academy again; instead she tells him stories of her classmates, or of Simon (sometimes he'll roll his eyes or chuckle at a piece of Simon's hopelessness with girls just as if he knew him as well as she does), and he responds with tales of the hardened men and women who work with him at the docks near the city's edge, people unlike anyone she's ever known.

"It sounds like so much fun," she says, breathless with laughter after he tells the story of a pilot friend of his with a horrible mustache and a ridiculous sense of humor, and all the trials he went through trying to get a woman to notice him. "To fly out into space with people like that, and just leave everything behind for a while."

She watches him sideways from under her lashes, half hoping for an offer she knows won't come, for something she doesn't quite understand but still knows is ridiculous.

Instead he looks to the sky with a dreamy, half lost look, as though he's up there already, ages of time and space between them. "It surely is, little one."

River looks up at the sky too, so she won't have to look at him, and feels her heart twist.

x-X-x

"What will you do now?" he asks her, when the leaves start to turn and the days grow cooler, though there's no true winter here on Osiris, just a season of cool winds and bare branches.

"I don't know," she says; she has been wondering that herself, ever since writing a polite letter to the Academy thanking them for their generous offer while informing them that she would not be attending after all. "I've been thinking of doing a doctorate in physics. Or maybe biology, then I could do research. Or I could go to MedAcad like Simon, but they don't accept students until they're eighteen."

He shrugs. "Three years, that ain't so long a wait. Could take that time, do whatever you please with it. Just be River for a while."

She does not look at him, does not tell him anything with words or without; her fifteenth birthday had been two weeks ago, and she'd said nothing of it to him.

"I could," she says instead, watching her finger trace patterns in the soft grey wood between them, circling closer and closer to him and then skirting away, just as she backs away from a truth she is beginning to be sure of. "I could join a dance company, and travel the Core," she says, a shade too brightly, grinning at him.

"Might do," he says, and he doesn't grin back, but she can see the corners of his eyes crinkling up, and knows he wants to. "Expect you'd be good at anything you set your mind to, darlin'."

She ignores the endearment, as she ignored his knowledge of her age, as she's ignored it when he brings her favorite foods on occasion, or knows things about Simon she's certain she's never mentioned. She has thought about it, and decided that this is a thing she does not want to know.

x-X-x

The day before Unification Day, he comes late to their bench in the park, just as she's about to give him up as a lost cause, though he's never abandoned her before.

The reason for his lateness is easily apparent, blood crusted over his eyebrow, smeared across his knuckles, spattered over his shirt, an obvious stain despite his attempts to cover it with his coat.

"What happened to you?" she asks, jumping up from the bench even as he sinks down onto it, wincing.

"Nothin' that ain't happened before," he says. "Not hardly worth making a fuss over, sit back down."

"Mal," she says softly (how she'd laughed the first time he'd told her his name, telling him it meant 'bad' in Latin and so suited him very well, as far as she could see), "you're hurt." She can see the swelling around his eye now, a swelling that will no doubt turn blue and bruised before long. Her hands flutter helplessly before her; for all Simon's praise of her abilities and her mind, she doesn't have his skill with wounded people, his calm, practical manner around injuries.

"Other's fella's face just happened to run into my fist," he says, leaning back and closing his eyes. "He's not looking any prettier, I promise you that."

His eyes stay closed for a long time, long enough for her to wonder if she should call Simon (_and say what_, part of her mind asks - '_Hello Simon, I made a new friend in an alley nine months ago and never mentioned him because he's older and quite possibly crazy, and also, he just got beat up so I need your help'_?).

"Really ain't so bad as it looks," he says then, interrupting her thoughts. "Stop lookin' at me like I'm about to keel over."

"How do you know that's what I'm doing?" she asks on reflex, because really, knowing things without looking is _her_ territory.

"Cause that's how you always look at me when I get hurt," he says, and she lets it hang there, doesn't remind him she's never seen him hurt before, because she is tired of this pretense, tired of suspecting and not knowing, of the way he confuses and muddles her feelings where there's always been order and calm before.

"Think I mighta lost my job though," he says after a minute, when it must be clear she's not going to respond, not going to take his bait. He's tired too, she realizes, looking at the weary lines of him slumped next to her, not just physically but in every way imaginable.

"You hate it here," she says, surprised to hear it burst from her lips; she had meant to say something else entirely, she was sure.

"Yeah." His eyes are open again, staring up at the sky, away from her.

"Then why do you stay?" She wants to know the answer and she doesn't; it's too big, too overwhelming, like a tidal wave creeping up behind her that she is tired of running from.

"You already know why."

"I want to hear you say it," she says, almost too soft to hear, but he must, because he breathes deep and then hisses in pain, holding a hand to his side.

"Cause of the first rule of flying," he says, sitting up gingerly, and she's sorry enough to have caused him pain that she ignores that answer, cryptic as it is.

"I went riding with my friend Athena yesterday," she offers instead. "They needed a new groom at the stables. It's hard to find anyone around here who knows horses."

For the first time she can remember, he looks surprised at something she's said. "Didn't know you rode."

"I just started a month ago," she says, hoping not to blush. He'd mentioned a ranch once, with such fondness in his voice that she'd found herself dreaming of him riding across grassy plains, all dressed in leather. She felt like a ridiculous child every time she got on a horse and remembered why she'd done it, and her mother fretted that she was sure to be thrown and break something, but still, River persisted. The look in Mal's eyes made it all worth it. "Anyhow, you could try there. It would be better than the docks."

"How'd you know I like horses?"

"You already know how," she says, and he laughs, despite his bruised ribs.

x-X-x

She starts seeing him more at the stables after that; she begs her father for more money and pays for private lessons so they can ride out together, though it feels shameful somehow, to pay for his time, and she thinks he feels the same at first, when he mounts up beside her with his face all stern and serious.

"First things first," he says, before she can think of anything to say. "When we're up here, I'm the captain, and that means you do as I say, _dong ma_?"

"Yes, Captain," she says, grinning at his utterly woeful Chinese.

He smiles back at her like she's the most beautiful thing in the universe.

x-X-x

"You know me," she says, one sunny afternoon lying in the long grass. A strip of cultivated forest separates them from the city, and the illusion of peace and solitude, of existing in a different world has given her the courage to say it, the means to allow her to believe that anything might be possible.

He's sitting beside her, back propped against a tree trunk, neatly slicing an apple, carving it down to the core, bit by bit.

"Course I know you," he says, offering her a slice from the edge of his knife. "Been almost a year now, be fair to say we know each other."

"No," she says, staring up into the blue of the sky, wondering how almost a year has slid past without her noticing, how time keeps rushing faster and faster around her. "You knew me before that. And Simon too, I think. You know too much."

The sounds of his movement pause, and she wonders if it could ever be long enough, if they're both ready for the wave to crash down on them.

"No," he says finally, with a bewildered sort of laugh under his voice, strained and bitter. "No, I didn't know _you_. Simon, he used to say how different you were before, but the way I saw it, didn't make much difference. The River I knew was all I'd ever known, and she was enough. Now, think I can see what he meant. You're her, but you're not."

She doesn't remember sitting up, doesn't realize it until she can feel the grass clutched tight under her hand. "Who are you?" she whispers, searching for fear, finding mostly curiosity. "_What_ are you?"

He watches her for a long moment, and in a flash she can see herself through his eyes, tensed in the grass like an animal poised to flee.

"Hell if I know," he says finally, slicing into the apple again, the crisp snap breaking the tension, and in that sound she can feel the sun again, warm on her back, and hear the birds, feel the world resume its revolutions.

He offers her another slice of apple, and asks, "What do you think about time travel?"

x-X-x

_It's impossible_. That had been her first thought, the same thought that everyone knew. Then she stopped to ponder the problem, to twist it around and look at it from different angles, to shift the paradigm and let what she _knew_ fall away, until her mind could present her with what she _thought_.

"It might be possible," she says finally, not really even seeing Mal anymore, lost in the paths of her mind. "Time might not be linear, but concurrent, everything happening at once – then there is no past, nothing that's gone forever, only a constant now. You would have to see it as another dimension of reality, basically."

"Can't say as I understood that any more than the first time you tried explainin' it to me," he says, "but must be that you're right, cause here I am."

"I was the girl," she says, and though she thinks she's always known it on some level, her stomach still twists, threatening to send her apple bits back up again. "The girl you knew who went to the Academy, the one who was tortured and broken and always afraid. It was me."

"Yes," he says, and there's no joke to soften it, no quips, just that harsh reality of that single word. She's furious at herself for the tears that well up in her eyes, because she's fifteen years old now, not a little girl anymore, and she resists the urge to rub them away with the back of her hand, letting them spill rather than look even more like a child.

Mal sighs, and pats the ground next to him. "Never could abide a woman's tears. Come here, darlin'."

So she hears her story pressed up against him, his arm around her shoulders, solid and warm.

Some part of her brain still thinks it's relevant to remember that this is the first time he's ever touched her.

x-X-x

He tells it all simple and plain, without much detail: how she came onto his ship in a cryo-box, stolen from the Academy by Simon (she cries more when he tells her that, and remembers how she'd blithely promised that Simon would never let them take her away), how the Alliance had sent people to recapture her, time and again, how they'd always managed, somehow, to stay one step ahead, until she'd remembered something about a planet called Miranda and the origin of Reavers.

He tells her about the battle they'd fought then, with the Reavers and with the Alliance unit sent to recover her, and his voice turns bitter and heavy, and she knows there's something he's not telling, something he doesn't want to examine too closely, even here and now.

And then he tells her about the time afterward, when they had some peace for a while, and life had been happier. She'd seemed better, he said (River doesn't tell him that it's impossible to think of herself as the woman he describes, broken and lost and turned into some kind of weapon; that is not her, could _never_ be her), and Simon had even gotten married to one of their crewmates.

"We were happy," he says. "Happy 'nough, at least. Had no coin to speak of, and you kept giving me grey hairs, way you flew my ship, but that weren't nothin' to complain about. And then it started up again."

She'd gotten snatched, he tells her, one day while they were in port. They'd found her easy enough, and the two men who did it were already dead by the time they did (she tries to imagine killing someone, tries to imagine blood on her hands and the gasping sounds of someone's last breaths, and can't do it), but from then on it was like it had been in the beginning, always running, never secure.

"And you were...well, you weren't any too pleased," he says. "You were always worried they'd figure out how to use you, make you hurt us, and wasn't nothing any of us could say that made you feel any better, til Simon said you oughta do some research, use your mind for something 'sides worrying."

He looks down at her, the setting sun picking out the gold in his hair. "So you designed yourself a time machine, and Kaylee helped you build it."

"And you used it," she says, hearing the accusation in her voice but not being able to stop it; she knows however different she was, this River-who-might-have-been, she would _never_ have asked someone else to take on such a risk. Never.

"I did," he says, "and stop giving me that look for it, that's what I've been trying to avoid near on a year now."

"But _why_?" she demands, jerking away from him. "Why would you ever do such a stupid, reckless, idiotic thing?"

"Seems you oughta know by now that's just what I do," he says, but then his smile dies, and he looks down at his hands, empty in his lap. "You had one of your spells, after you had a dream, or a vision or some such – hell if I know what to call it. You went on and on about how you were a danger, how you couldn't go back, all the horrible things you might do. And then you looked me in the eye and you begged me to kill you. Clear and sane as I'd ever seen you."

He stops and looks at her for a long moment, and she feels every muscle still, like the moment in a dance just before the music begins, that perfect stillness where there is nothing but a heartbeat; the sound of anticipation.

"So I decided I'd try and save you instead."

x-X-x

"You didn't tell me everything," she says, over the soft sound of their horses' hooves, on the way back through the woods in twilight. She knows there are parts of the story missing still; not just the bitter and heavy bits, but something more, something she can't quite tease out.

"No," he says, and leaves it at that.

x-X-x

The next day, she makes her choice, and applies to the physics program, not at the University at Londinium, the biggest and best in the 'verse, but the smaller program at Osiris, where she and her work are less likely to attract undue attention.

III.

"If I built it once, I can do it again," she says, though honestly it isn't that easy; the first time she hadn't been alone. She's had to take up mechanical and electrical engineering too, and even _her_ mind is spinning when she finds time to sleep some nights. Sometimes weeks will go by before she realizes she hasn't seen him.

The first time, she panics, wondering if he'll still be there or if he wasn't some mirage she constructed, some silly girl's idea of a modern white knight, come to rescue her from a mundane life.

Of course he's there when she runs into the stable, with a pitchfork in his hands and a bit of hay in his hair, looking nothing like anyone's version of a hero, and she sits down and laughs until she cries while he looks down at her, bewildered.

(She tries to get more sleep after that, not just because she so obviously needed it, but because he'd also looked at her with an old sort of weary fear.)

"I'm sure you can, darlin'," he says. "Question is, what happens then?"

They're sitting up in the hayloft in darkness, with the comfortable smells of horses and leather and hay around them, and she rests her head against his shoulder and sighs, because truthfully she's too tired to hold her own head up, much less resolve that sort of question.

"I don't know yet," she says. "But I'll figure it out." She means to say more, to promise she'll get him home, but her mouth refuses to cooperate, and her words jumble, turning into a yawn.

At her side, Mal laughs. "Best be getting you home, little one. You're not hardly fit to speak, much less go pondering the mysteries of time and space."

"Can't I just stay here with you?" she mumbles, and though she really didn't mean a thing by it other than that she was too exhausted to think of moving, she feels his muscles go stiff for an instant before he responds, easily enough.

"No chance of that. You steal the blankets, and it's gettin' too cold at night for a man to go without."

"How would you know?" she asks, wide awake now.

"Space monkeys told me," he says, moving as though to get up, but she stops him, catching hold of his arm and tugging him back down.

"You've slept with me!" she accuses, and if her heart hadn't been pounding in her ears, she might have laughed at the expression of wounded indignation that passes over his face.

"_Shen sheng de gao wan!_ I have _not_!" he insists.

"Well, not _me_," she says, keeping her hold on his arm despite his attempts to dislodge her. "But the other me. You know what I mean."

"_Wo de ma_, River, you shouldn't even know about the whole..." - he makes a hopeless gesture with his free hand before seeming to give it up and finishing in a very undignified fashion - "people sleeping with other people thing."

"I'm sixteen years old, Mal," she points out (though it still sounds strange to say so; her birthday had been only last month), "not a child. I know about sex."

"Please tell me that knowing ain't from experience," he says. "No, wait, on second thought, I can't be hearing that, don't tell me."

Part of her wants to laugh; the other part of her is beginning to realize, in a very real way, just how much her life has diverged from what could have been.

"How old was I, the first time?" she asks softly, and he shoots her a look in the darkness that she can't quite grasp.

"Nineteen," he says. "And I still felt like I was going to the gorram special hell for it."

"Did you love me?" she asks.

"More'n just about anything," he says, and she thinks she has always known this, because there's really nothing else to explain why he's done what he has, why he's ended up here and stayed near her all this time, in this world that's everything he despises.

"Do you love me now?"

He doesn't answer, and she studies him in the dim light, barely enough to make out the shape of his face. He doesn't flinch when she lays her hand against his cheek; he just sighs, and turns his head enough to kiss her palm before he wraps her hand in his and brings it back down.

"I can't, River. Not that I don't...I just can't."

She doesn't ask _why_, fearing her voice might wobble and break if she does, but he knows her well enough to hear it anyhow.

"You're so gorram young they'd string me up in open court for it, for one," he says, "and I'd be tying the noose for 'em. And...sounds like a damn fool thing to say, I know, but it feels like I'd be betraying you."

She knows somehow that he doesn't mean _her_, the River that's right here in front of him, but the other River, the half mad prophet he knew her as first, and for a moment she hates herself, this other self who lost and gained so much.

"I don't like being two different people," she says, and he smiles sadly, running his fingers through her hair.

"You do this thing right, and you won't be."

x-X-x

"What if the past can't truly be changed? What if it were all for nothin', and I go back to find not a damn thing different?"

_What if I can't send you back at all_, she thinks, but doesn't say it. "Maybe you can't. Maybe everything is just a parallel universe, and in mine you succeeded, but in yours you didn't."

"You don't believe that," he says, low and quiet.

"No. I believe in you," she says, when what she means is, _Wouldn't it have been worth it just to try? Wouldn't I have been worth it?_

x-X-x

It takes her more than a year, in the end; closer to eighteen months, between waiting for funding, for materials, for space; between failing and starting over again, and again, and once more; between forgetting to eat or sleep, and gaining a reputation that was the opposite of what she'd always dreamed.

Still, River Tam does not give up, and in the end, it stands, shining and finished and waiting to take away what she knows now is the best thing that will ever happen to her.

x-X-x

"I can't say for sure what will happen," she says a week later, lying in the hayloft again, close enough to feel the heat from his body, though he doesn't touch her; he hasn't in over a year. "I don't know how time will seem to have passed at the other end. It might seem like you were gone for five minutes, or..."

"Or it might have been fifty years," he finishes.

"Or more," she admits. "I don't think my calculations could be that far off, but it's always possible. How long were you on Osiris, before that first time you found me?" It's strange, but she's never thought to ask that before, never thought of him existing in her world before he spoke to her from the mouth of that alley, three years ago. Two lifetimes ago.

"About a year," he says. "Wasn't so bad, gave me time to find you."

_A year_. Spent on his own, on a world he hated every piece of, working menial jobs and waiting for a girl to grow up enough to understand what he had to tell her. River closes her eyes, and runs through the calculations again in her head, making sure they are flawless, that she can give him back every minute of life she can. _I owe him that_.

"That don't worry me so much as the people," he says, and she hasn't wanted to talk about this, no more than he has, but now there is no more time.

"The timelines aren't the same anymore," she says. "If I were going to be there, I'd already be there, and Simon too. It'll be as though you never met us, because...well, you won't have."

"Don't know as there'll be much for me to get back to, then," he says. "Times were when you or Simon saved me and mine, more'n once."

She shrugs, though she knows he can't see the gesture in the dark; the rustling hay speaks for her. She's given up on trying to predict what might be, knowing nothing she does now can change that for him. "Would you have even been in those situations without us? You can't imagine how different things might be or not. You'll drive yourself mad trying."

"Yeah," he says. "Might be I'll get me a trade." His voice is bleak; she knows now about his fallen crew members and friends, how they'd died (_because of me_, her mind whispers), and how half of him hopes things might be different now. He doesn't say it, but she thinks she knows just the same – that the other half is afraid of losing them all over again.

"And they won't remember you?" he asks. "Or Simon?"

"They'll never have known us," she says, swallowing hard; she feels like she knows them through him, these people she's never met, not in this lifetime. "There won't be anything to remember."

"But I'll remember?" His voice is soft in the darkness, and she reaches across empty space until her fingers meet his.

"You and I," she says, as their fingers intertwine, feeling natural as breathing. "We'll remember everything."

x-X-x

"It has to be tomorrow night," she tells him, when the early springtime dawn begins to creep in around them, still lying with their hands joined. "The government heard about my work, and they're very interested. They're sending a team out the day after tomorrow."

His hand tightens around hers, so hard she flinches; this is why she waited until the last possible minute. "They'll never leave you alone, will they?" he asks, and she cuts him off before he can say it, before he can offer to stay here for her.

"They will. I'll make sure of it. You've protected me long enough, Mal; trust me to do it on my own now."

"Maybe you're not so different after all," he says, and pulls her closer; she puts her ear to his chest and listens to the beat of his heart, counting down the seconds remaining.

x-X-x

Everything goes according to plan ("For once," he says, a last flash of humor that she'll cling to afterward) and before she knows it, before she's ready, their time is up, and her hands are hovering over the sequence that will wipe him from her existence.

They haven't said goodbye; it feels all wrong somehow, like cutting off a story in the middle, a story that was never supposed to be told.

"It'll be nice to be back on my ship," he says, staring at her from only a foot away, a distance that might as well have been light years. "Always take her to Persephone this time of year, for Zoe's birthday. She pretends she don't like to have a fuss made, but...give us all something fun to do," he finishes, and she wonders for a moment why he's babbling on, if his nerves are worse than she'd thought. "Touch down there same time, every year. Expect we always will," he says, looking straight at her, and finally she understands, and smiles, and starts the sequence.

"Mal," she calls, over the growing hum, the steady low vibration at the edge of hearing, "You never told me. What's the first rule of flying?"

He smiles back at her then, that lopsided grin that tears at her heart and puts it back together, all at once.

"Love," he says, and then he's gone.

x-X-x

She gives herself fifteen minutes there, alone in the lab.

Then she calls Simon, to tell him she needs his help, his shuttle, and his hospital access card.

She doesn't wait for his response, just disconnects and picks up the sledgehammer.

x-X-x

She tells Simon the whole story as they feed her work into the hospital incinerator, piece by shattered piece, and then goes on with the telling long after it's all melted away, all her plans and records, all the evidence that she had built this thing, that she had lived at all for the past few years.

He believes her, every word of it; Simon has always been a better brother than she ever deserved.

x-X-x

In the morning, she tells the government team that her work was an unfortunate failure, and that she'd destroyed it in a fit of pique.

They call her highly unsuitable and a disappointment, and many other things besides before they finally leave, alone and empty-handed.

River feels nothing but relief.

x-X-x

There is a small ballet company on Persephone; nothing to compare to the famed Sihnon Ballet Company, to be sure, but it suits River well enough, being a few years out of practice.

Simon comes along too, over their parents' disbelieving protests; the hospitals here are still decent enough, and he rises far faster than he could have back on Osiris anyhow, though she warns him that they won't be staying long.

There are cherry trees on Persephone as well, to mark the coming of spring, and as the days grow longer, she feels like a flower herself, turning her face to the sky, watching the silver flashes resolve into ships, day by day.

He finds her, in the end, sitting amid the falling white blossoms, a little oasis of calm in the chaos of the market.

Her eyes are closed, basking in the sunlight and the scent of the trees, trying to remember the feel of soft grey wood under her fingertips, when his voice reaches out to her, past and future colliding all at once into the _now_.

"'Scuse me, miss," he says, standing there in a long brown coat like the hero from her girlish dreams, "you wouldn't happen to know anything about flying, would you? See, I got the best pilot in the 'verse flying my ship now, but he keeps complainin' about needing some time off, seeing as his wife's 'bout to have a baby and all. Think it might suit you?"

"I've never flown a ship before," she admits, taking the hand he offers to pull her to her feet. "But I do know the first rule."

"And what's that?" he asks, the corners of his eyes crinkling up.

"You already know."

"I do, but I like to hear you say it," he says, and she thinks they'll never need to say it, that they've proven it a thousand times over, that they've remade themselves around it.

So she doesn't say a thing, just presses her lips to his, and lets that say all she knows.

It's enough.


End file.
